The college football season kicks off this weekend with a game between Florida State and Georgia Tech in Ireland. This is what is now called “week zero” of the college football calendar where a handful of teams start the season early. Labor Day weekend remains the “official” start of the college football season. For the longest time, football season was Labor Day to Thanksgiving, but like everything else that tradition has given way to rapacious greed by all involved.

College sports is a genuinely American thing. On the one hand, it is amateur sports played by college students. On the other hand, it is a billion-dollar sports entertainment industry operating on college campuses. Even elite colleges like Stanford, Northwestern and Boston College find a way to be in the circus, while pretending to put academics ahead of the sports entertainment business. It is a uniquely American form of mass self-deception that the rest of the world does not understand.

The roots of college football are as normal as any other tradition. The game evolved from both rugby and soccer, which were popular sports in the 19th century. The old English line that “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen” carried over to America. Young college men would play one or both, depending upon their inclination. Before long they combined into what eventually became American football.

Naturally, the young men playing sports on their college campus would want to test themselves against the young men on the nearby college campus. Until fairly recent, this was the normal habit of young males. Legend has it that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American football game, but it was more like soccer. Harvard and McGill played the new game which quickly became popular and eventually supplanted both soccer and rugby on the college campus.

To some degree, the popularity of college football was due to one of those threads that made up the American character. In every region of the new country, self-organization was an essential element of life. This is something Tocqueville noted when he traveled around America in the 19th century. Self-organization was the antidote to the alienation and isolation that arises from democracy. Instead of withdrawing from mass public life, the individual forms islands of free association.

You see that in the early days of college football. The sport got its big boost in the Great Depression when local leaders were looking for ways to rally the people and keep them from organizing revolts against the government. Cheering on the local team as they did battle with the team from across town or across the state line was a good way to bring people together and to give them a healthy outlet. Many sports rivalries were born during the Great depression, even high school rivalries.

Of course, free association is at the heart of the college experience. For most families, primary school is a function of where they live. Your kids go to the local public schools whether you like it or not. It is why in the current age it has become common to ask the realtor showing you houses about the local basketball team. Parents understand that they are not just buying a house, but they are committing their children to the schools that come with the community in which the house is located.

College has never been that way. Young people are free to pick whatever college they like as long as they get accepted and can afford it. That plays a part in how the alumni of every school view their rival. Every school’s rival is populated with impoverished simpletons for some reason. While most students attend college within a three-hour drive of home, they are still spoiled for choice. This makes the rivalries between the schools possible and often makes them quite intense.

That is why college football rivalries remain, despite the fact that the localized logic and self-organization have given way to financialization and greed. The family who has always gone to Oklahoma continues to suspect that the people with the Longhorn sticker on their car are Harris voters, because it is the way it has always been and every autumn, they are reminded of that at the big game. America has always been a diverse country and that has always been the root of college rivalries.

The acid of modernity is slowly eroding this bit of social capital. The television oligopolies have decided it is good for them to have Oregon and Rutgers in the same football league. The league Oregon played in since forever was destroyed so they could join the Big Ten, which is still technically a Midwest conference. Washington, USC, and UCLA have also joined a conference whose center is two times zones away, because that makes sense to the bankers.

What is happening to college football is a microcosm of what has been happening everywhere in America since the dawn of financialization. The money men find a way to monetize social capital in order to haul it away to their vaults, leaving behind a shuffling husk of that which they sucked dry. College football is well on its way to becoming as artificial and synthetic as the suburban town center. The reason it exists is nothing organic is allowed to replace it.

Whether or not this is sustainable is never asked, as the point of the American economic model is for connected people to create bottlenecks they can then use to skim money from every transaction that passes through that bottleneck. This was the point Peter Theil made in his book. Once that bottleneck or monopoly is played out, then the parasites get back in their wagon and go looking for a new opportunity to exploit and never look back at what they left behind.

College football attendance has been in steady decline for a decade, even though the television dollars have exploded. They claim ratings are great, but no one cares about TV ratings, as most of the revenue comes from subscriptions. Television in America is one of those bottlenecks the oligarchs exploit. It is why CNN remains in business, despite having few viewers. At some point, the empty seats at football games will become a problem, but no one worries about it now.

For now, like so much of American life, what sustains college football is the echo of old America on which college football was built. Men watch games on Saturday because they watched games with their father, who watched games with his father. Maybe you make a trip to your alma mater once a year to see a game. The tradition has been hollowed out and is now worn as a skin suit by oleaginous television executives and grasping college administrators, but it is all you got.

That is the thing about traditions. People will hang onto them, no matter how tattered and lifeless, until something comes along to replace them. College football is a good example and representative of America as a whole. The fumes of old glory and old traditions fuel the present, but something will come along to replace those things and the people profiting off the nostalgia for them. After all, on any given Saturday, something could happen that changes everything.

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